Week #4

This week, we explored various curation tools throughout the Internet.  What a curator is, why curators are just as important as creators, and how not everyone can be a creator or a curator.   We also investigated on-line bookmarking tools and what the limitations of browser bookmarking are, such as limited access. Everyone uses their web browser for bookmarks, saving their most visited webpages for later, as well as important resources that you may need to refer to at a later date.  For the most part, as there are exceptions, when you bookmark something in your browser, that bookmark is saved on the computer you are using and you are unable to access this bookmark anywhere else. Most browsers now seem to be moving towards a cloud based bookmarking system where when you log into another computer or device, your bookmarks are automatically synced. However, there are still limitations to this.  What if you are on a public computer at the library and don't want everyone to access your synced bookmarks? Your not going to log your account into a public computers browser as the browser is going to save your information and always log into it.  This is where on-line bookmarking tools such as Diigo come in handy.

Diigo is an online bookmarking tool that has many more capabilities than your standard browser bookmarks.  With Diigo, you will create an account that will allow you to access your account anywhere, be it your own computer, smartphone, or a public computer. When you create a bookmark with Diigo, it asks you to assign tags to your bookmark.  This can be an extremely useful feature if you have an extensive list of bookmarks and can't quite remember what bookmark you are looking for. Say, for example, you bookmarked your favourite social network, but for some reason you couldn't remember what it was called, you could simply assign it a tag, such as "social", and search that tag. You will then come up with all of the bookmarks that have this tag assigned, making easier to track that item down. This could be extremely useful for a school project or any other educational activity since you could set a specific tag for any project, search that tag and track down all of your saved resources related to that project in seconds, saving valuable time.

With the use of Diigo, as well as the other tools that we have explored, I am beginning to find it a lot easier to access information and sort through what is relevant to me, and what can be discarded, allowing me to become much more digitally literate.  I had considered myself quite proficient with various digital tools, but with the introduction of these new tools, I find myself spending much less time sorting through all the information.  Diigo would fit into the organize category of my PLE, as it is a tool that helps me to organize information for my in an easy to access way.  Any curation tool, such as Scoop.it, would be in the aggregating and connecting categories of my PLE, since it presents information to me and allows me to share it with my friends.